


Nafash

by robbierreyes



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: F/M, Holocaust, Jewish Comics Day, Missing Scene, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-10
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-07-14 05:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7155896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robbierreyes/pseuds/robbierreyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Child of Avraham and the Atom don't you wish you were a little bit less chosen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nafash

**Author's Note:**

> Unfortunately the XCU was fucking gross and whitewashed the fuck out of Magda so I had to change her name bc I'll fucking die before I let Marvel claim as another white person as the Maximoffs when they aren't

When Malach asked him to dance that night Poznań he should have said no, he should have told her to run far away. Why had he let her know who he was? Why had he chosen to tell her everything in Yiddish? Because he assumed she would not understand, instead Malach had put her hand on his face and whispered back in Yiddish. Malach laughed because she too could do extraordinary things. That when she looked to the sky birds would sometimes swoop down and say hello. Though she admitted that might have been more mundane talent instead of mutantism and in that moment he could practically hear the thunder bolt hit him in the heart.

It was not until later there were other ways that they were similar other as well. Whereas he bound, Malach would wear a stuffed bra. It was incredibly comforting for both of them. An understanding that they had never felt with partners previously. Maybe it was the understanding that made them fall more in love. Malach is a better girlfriend than he thought he deserved. He had never allowed himself to lean on anyone except for Charles and that had ended badly to say the least. Malach truly was a force on her own.  She has her own house, a store, a cat, a pair of candle sticks from her mother and a siddur.

Erik thought it was passed down to her when he first starting spending the night. She laughed at that, she bought it for far less than it was worth. Malach put it back together from the shambles it had been in after the war and if her story was completely truthful it sounds like she built it back up on her own. The store she did inherit. There had been an old woman who had been like them and had hired Malach when she realized. So she had handed it left to Malach after her death.

The ring he gives her would probably not look like much too any other person. More like a wedding band than an engagement ring. It’s made out of iron and he more than expected her to turn it down, but honestly who in his right mind gives the person he wants to marry a ring that he made especially when that ring isn’t even gold, especially without a diamond. Instead of rejecting him like he expects she takes the ring from him and laughs. She never actually says yes but she does kiss him and starts wearing it so he assumes that means the same thing.

Malach drags him into the Shul though truthfully Erik is only halfheartedly resisting it. He has avoided synagogues like the plague for years, they always reminded him of the night in November and he could not bare to get attached to one again and watch that happen again. After his time under the Pentagon he could not help but miss them. He had been isolated, he had longed for the company of others like him. Other mutants, other Jews, preferably people who were both if he could have his way. He longed for the communities that once felt like home.

After all he had been through in his life he had being married under a canopy was something he thought would never happen, but Malach insisted on it. A snowy evening in 1975, Erik breaks the cup for the first time in his life. He knows that it is supposed to be breaking the bonds of your old family to form your new one, but not this time. The glass shattering in the bag was his old life. All the killing he had to do, all the fighting he had done. It was time to stop. He could hide because the world was different now. A difference he had caused, well Raven caused because of him. She had done more for mutants than he ever could. Or at least he kept telling himself that.

It was a hard adjustment though, to stop fighting. To try to sooth the mania that made it easy to stand up to lead. He had only originally been planning to do it for a couple of months and then going back to find more mutants try to do something again but the time never seemed right and now. Erik looked up at the stained glass faces, he could feel it start into him for a moment before he had to tear his eyes away from it and back to Malach. This was him starting over. Maybe trying Charles’ way for a while.

A while, turns out was going to take a lot longer than he expected. Their family of two was on its way to becoming a family of three before either of them had planned it to be. Erik found himself filled with a fresh dread. He had been a father before. He does not know what the child looked like or if they had screamed their way into the world for a few brief moments, he does not remember them being born but he does remember the aftermath. He remembered sitting in the plastic cell while a nurse whose face was burned into retinas telling him that they had not made it. Some part of him, a larger part than he wished to admit thinks he might have been lied to. That the child had lived, but that is an impossible thought for a man who had faith in Hashem and humans left. Erik was not one of those men.

Erik almost decided not to try with this one, to stop this child from being born on his own terms. He decides not to think about it until he is ready. For the first time his life, Erik “Goal Oriented” Lehnsherr procrastinated. He worked harder in the steel factory. He works more hours, eats as much as his body would allow him to. He ends up falling over in the kitchen before he lets himself be dragged to the hospital. After several firm lectures from the Doctor who insisted on misgendering him and a very frustrated and angry Malach. He does not tell her about his first born until the doctor was long gone.

The most surprising thing about the trip home is that Malach does not push the subject of parenthood again. In fact they barely mention it for a longer time than he would have expected, but he can feel her gaze on the back of his neck. She watches him closer. Makes sure he eats more even if she does not admit to doing so. It takes them almost an entire month to discuss other things about their child.

There was an old Jewish superstition that you were not supposed to buy anything for your new born until after they were born. Malach reminds him as they sit in their living room the tension finally breaking, she placed her hand next to his, allowing contact to be his choice. It was more comforting than just touching him would be. Maybe he could try this for her.

Nina they learn on a crisp autumn morning, the morning of Sukkots in fact, has inherited both his lungs and his scowl. Malach clings to her a little tighter than she probably should but he cannot exactly blame her. She’s so small and he had been so sure that she would not make it this far. It was almost a full hour before the infant finds her way back into his arms, she screams the whole time he holds her and he is not sure that he has ever been prouder of anything else in his life.

Malach does not let Nina out of her sight, the baby goes to the store with her every morning before Erik leaves for work. Perhaps it was the best. He could feel his brain cycling out of the long lasting and weakening depressive episode and into something more dangerous. The low thoughts stayed and ever present and darkened part of his brain while his body kicked up into a fresh kind of overdrive. He needs to get out. He needs to run, run back to the only thing that he was good at. To the fight belonged in. He does not deserve to be here, he should not be here. He and Malach built this he cannot allow himself to tear it down.

He was half packed by the time Malach entered his room again. She laughs and it catches Erik more off guard than anyone expect the great leader Magneto to ever be in his own home. Her laughter catches him off guard more than anything else though. He tries to burn the sound into his memory. Nina joins in with soft toddler giggles and he can feel the world changing again. Faith in cause that he had almost sight of solidifies in his heart again.

Sooner or later Nina would probably begin to show mutant abilities. This world needed to be safer for her, for mutants everywhere. He would get back in the fray when she was old enough, when she was ready to be a part of the cause. He had two weaknesses: mutants and family and she was both. He will not let humans hurt her. He will not let her hate her mutantism. Memories of the words _mutant and proud_ echo through his mind and he ignores the pang in his chest.

Nina’s mutant abilities begin to show the next year he notes with pride. She’s almost a full four years before his did, he notes with proud. She feels a connection with birds, they come to her, they do things for her, and they bring her gifts. Erik knows that she will come into her own with it in a few years. Perhaps she will need guidance that he would not be able to give her. Thoughts of the school come back to him, thoughts of his small class of students, thoughts how many of them that were gone…Erik had no interest in sending Nina to a school thousands of miles away anytime soon.

Nina’s too young anyway, barely five years old. A fast learner though. She was already picking up other languages, she caught him guard a few days earlier by responding to in Yiddish when he grumbled in it angrily. It was more than a little bit jarring to hear it coming out of her tiny five year old mouth. Especially because he and Malach had made an effort to only use Yiddish around her when they did not want her to understand what they were saying. She had already figured out how to read. Well somewhat, she needs a great deal of help. Nina tried everything to try to convince them to let her learn how to read Yiddish as well as Polish despite only knowing the words that Erik and Malach used in the house. Well she was until Malach shows her the Aleph Bet and that it looked completely different from the Polish one. She opts out as soon as her eyes scan across the page, deciding that it was a project for a seven year old because maybe five year olds are not big enough kids yet.

Nina’s sixth birthday is when he deems her old enough to inherit the only image of his parents that he had left of his family. Her jaw drops when he pulls the sliver chain from around his neck and holds the locket up to her round face. Erik watches as her fingers open up to see the pictures of the two most important people that she will never meet. She asks what the word for the Grandma and Grandpa in his language is. He presses a kiss to her forehead.

Malach begins to actively teach Nina Yiddish after her birthday. It is definitely something incredible to watch, Nina is incredibly headstrong about how some words are supposed to be pronounced no matter how incorrectly and Malach is just as stubborn about correcting her every time. There’s also the matter of schooling for the child. Technically she should have started already, not only was she the right age she was a little bit ahead of the curve when it came to things like language processing. Malach was insistent the child had been born having speaking full sentences.

It catches Erik off guard when a man he worked with clapped him playfully on the shoulder much in the way Charles used to. It was too familiar and it almost sent him spiralling. He had gone out of his way to avoid getting close with anyone besides his family in the tiny village that they had settled in. There were too many humans here, not enough mutants for him to feel safe creating bonds outside of them. The mutant could not risk one of them discovering that he was actually the man who had threatened the entire human race with total destruction nine years prior.

 Erik is afraid not that he would admit it. Afraid of having his family uprooted. Afraid of them being taken. Afraid that one morning he would not be able to run his fingers through Malach’s freshly dyed hair. That Nina’s laugh would become a distant memory like his mother’s. That he would find himself alone in the world again after he just begun to accept this life as truly his own. He could feel it in his bones, that Erik was fading into Henryk. Perhaps he notes while Nina chats and bounces importantly at a fellow child giving into that might not be the worst thing that ever happened to him.

When Malach and Nina finally are able to drag him to eat in other people’s homes. To talk to the semi-strangers in the market  for more than just business. Erik finds himself utterly flabbergasted he is making human friends. More than he has ever had in his entire life, well if you could call them friends The did not know a thing about who he actually was. They did not know anything about the anger of Magneto bubbling beneath the surface of his smile. Perhaps it was for the best. He did not reach out his hands though, he waited for the others to do so. They would laugh out that Henryk, the man he had built was shy. It was odd to him that was the assumption. He had always been known for charisma more than anything.

Of course it is when he finally finds himself being contented and happy in his life that he slips up. That he uses his powers outside of his own secure home. That he is seen. He saves someone, a co-worker. It was a mistake. He could see it in the faces of every man around him when he did it, they all knew. Every single one. Erik bolted as soon as his shift ended. Trying desperately to get to his house before anyone else. Before his family could be taken away again. He had to get them out.

Erik had the power to do so now right? He is not the scared little child who was physically ripped out of his mother’s arms anymore, not the child who made the metal gates twist. No now, he was strong. Strong enough to lift stadiums to protect people that he loved. He burst through the door, a manic gleam in his eye that he has not been there since that day ten years prior. He yells more desperation than anything else because he knows. He knows what happens to mutants when they are found, when he is found. Erik can feel the pit of his stomach drop into the floor when they discover she’s gone.

The parents go running through the woods, desperately trying to find the little one wherever she had hopefully just run off to. They both skid to a halt in front of the soldiers-police officers Erik corrects internally but it does not matter. Men in metal-less uniforms. He’s both scared and completely at unsurprised  the same time. Of course this would happen, of course he would try to save someone and this would happen.

“Just let them go.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is two parts I wanted to fill the space between DOFP and XMA and one part mega late submission for #jewishcomicsday


End file.
